Monday, June 10, 2013

This is the last in this summer’s series of guest blogs from me c/o
Beyond the Beyond. But before I hand over to Geeta Dayal, I’d like to
say ‘big up’ to my host Bruce and close out with something of an epic: a
sprawling almost-essay looking at Retromaniacal-parallels in a realm of
music that’s outside my customary remit–contemporary classical
composition.

^^^^^^^^^^

Last week I stumbled across a piece by New York magazine’s classical
music critic Justin Davidson, a critique of what he termed “a new New
York School” of composers whose eclecticism and border-crossing echoes
the downtown movement of the 1970s. The article is actually several
months old (but in this atemporal world, who cares?) and reading it I
was immediately struck by the convergences with Retromania’s concerns.

The piece’s subtitle is: “An omnivorous generation of composers could
use something to rage against”. Davidson vividly and not
unappreciatively describes the music made by a new breed of
“composer-performers who go merrily Dumpster-diving in styles of the
past and of distant parts… These composers in their thirties worry less
about categories, narrative, and originality than about atmosphere,
energy, and sound. .. they churn out somber symphonies, wry pop songs,
laptop meditations, filigreed chamber works, endearing études, and
occasional film scores. This cornucopia of new music seems perpetually
promising. It bristles with allusions and brims with ambition—yet it
somehow feels stifled by all that freedom.”

One of the composers focused on in the piece is Tyondai Braxton,
whose 45-minute suite Central Market is “a high-voltage score for
orchestra supplemented by amplified and effects-enriched kazoos,
electronically tricked-out voices, piano, a pair of synthesizers, and
six electric guitars… The music pounds through a sequence of musical
landscapes with the manic intensity of a movie foot chase. Insistent
syncopations, deliberate sonic overloads, whistled melodies, music-box
tinklings, jaunty motifs that repeat and trip over themselves—Braxton
grinds these ingredients together with the exuberance of a sorcerer on
speed. The piece is euphoric, crazy, and irresistible.”

Sounds eminently resistible to me, to be honest! Regardless of
whether you enjoy the work or not, “Central Market” appears from
Davidson’s account to fit the profile of what I’ve termed “hyperstasis”:
a syndrome that affect music at all levels from the individual works,
to the style/oeuvre of specific artist, to entire genres/scenes/fields
of sonic endeavour. The hallmark of hyperstasis is restless energy and a
fluid but ultimately facile transition between styles/modes/moods –
facile because related to digiculture’s facilitation of
long-valorised-in-music-criticism techniques of hybridization,
mix-and-blend, versatility, stylistic range, etc. In hyperstasis,
creativity rends itself apart in a paroxysm of optionality, it’s wracked
by a sort of frenzied indecisiveness, a fervour of non-commitment.

Davidson makes the digiculture connection himself, talking about how
composers like Tyondai Braxton ”use computers as compositional tools and
alchemizers of sound” and observing that “for the YouTube generation,
technology… grants entrance to a virtually infinite thrift store of
influences.
A century ago, Bartók had to haul his gramophone through the mud of
Moravia to learn about folk music. Now a curious kid in Brooklyn can
track down an Azerbaijani song in seconds. Today’s styles need not be
born of deep experience; they form out of collisions that bypass history
and geography. No combination is too weird.”

“Nonsectarianism” is Davidson’s term for what
popular/semipopular/barely-popular music critics like myself would
probably call impurism. Being a sectarian and a purist is invariably
regarded as a negative, for reasons I explored a decade ago in an essay
called “Pure Fusion: Multiculture Versus Monoculture” (which you can
find in the Bring the Noise collection recently put out in America by
Soft Skull). But it is way too easy to equate “nonsectarian” and
“impurist” with musical virtue. As Davidson astutely notes of the new
New York composers, their “freewheeling mash-ups aspire to hip
nonsectarianism, but the results can prove shockingly tame.”

Worse still, with the musical past’s archives splayed open, there is a
constant temptation to regress: “Their range of choices oppressively
wide, several composers have taken comfort from the past, masking
retrenchment with style and panache.”

By the time Davidson is writing about “well-crafted but oddly
familiar works [that] display the virtues of facility, versatility, and
curiosity, but… also showcase a group that seems disoriented by its own
open-mindedness”, or noting that “rules can be a crutch or a cage, but
they can also act as stimulant… Despite their gifts and alertness to
the moment, [these] composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they
badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative
constraints”, I’m imaginary-high-fiving the dude.

Tyondai Braxton is better known as former member of Battles, a fact
that leapt out at me because I’d only just got around to reading the
Battles cover story in The Wire from several issues back. Here too I
was struck by the band’s post-everything omnivorousness and the way both
their aesthetics and their ethos echoed progressive rock and jazz
fusion. Writer Daniel Spicer points to the way Battles draw on “elements
as disparate as Tropicalia, soca, Techno and synthpop”. I feel queasy
already.

One of Battles, Ian Williams, observes that “if you think about the
music that was available to experimental people and cool hippies in the
70s, it was probably classical music, jazz, and rock, right? And Prog
came out of that. With the internet, everybody’s exposed to World Music
now, and a much wider wealth of influence that come from everywhere. The
library that people are exposed to is much bigger now.”

I enjoyed the previous Battles album Mirrored, but on the new,
Tyondai-less Gloss Drop, the results of all these inputs leans to the
ludic(rous), the kind of chops-heavy comedy prog purveyed by Primus.
What Davidson, Spicer, Williams, are all talking about is the notion
expressed at the start of Gang Gang Dance’s recent Eye Contact album: “I
can hear everything. It’s everything time.”

But–as the fusion and prog analogies show–it’s actually been
everything time for rather a long while the only difference is that it’s
cheaper (virtually costless, thanks to file-sharing) and easier (thanks
to digiculture) to access that Everything.

What is significantly different now is the factor of atemporality.
Earlier phases of hybridity and eclecticism tended to have an
orientation to the present: prog had its classical-music recursions and
folk flavours, but for the most part Seventies progressive minded
musicians were doing their fusing with stuff that was current or from
very recent and usually black music.

So Led Zeppelin got inspired by The Meters and James Brown, while
The Police drew on contemporaneous reggae/ (Intriguingly both Led Zep’s
James Brown pastiche ‘The Crunge’ and “early Police” crop up as
comparison points for Battles in the Wire piece). Fusion aka jazz-rock
aka jazz-funk was entirely about jazz responding to contemporary black
dance styles or Latin/world influences, and also engaging with the
latest technology (synths with Weather Report, Herbie Hancock etc).

Much the same applies to postpunk and early Eighties art-pop: Talking
Heads responded to current or relatively recent recordings by
Parliament-Funkadelic and Fela Kuti; New Order were inspired by
Italo-disco and the club tracks emanating from New York, and so forth.

These kinds of real-time transfers of ideas occurred at all levels of
pop music, in fact, not just the self-consciously arty,
progressive-minded sector: a band of such lowly ambition as Foghat
imitated Larry Graham’s slap-bass techniques on “Slow Ride”!

What gradually developed, with the passage of time, was the onset of
atemporality: more and more elements in a new band’s make-up cease to
relate to the present genrescape and instead involve rummaging through
the archives.

This started to take effect even before the Internet took off, on
account of crate-digging, esotericism and obscurantism, and the
burgeoning reissue industry. A band like Tortoise was an archetype of
mid-Nineties, just-pre-Internet nu-fusion: they had current influences
(some hip hop, some math-rock) but also dub, Ry Cooder, Morricone,
marimba-pulses via Steve Reich, etc. A vigorous brew at first, soon to
droop into a sort of Spyro Gyra for Wire readers.

What is different about music now is that open-minded, curious
musicians are responding to and fusing with influences from all across
music history and all across the globe. This ought to provide them with a
palette of infinite possibilities. And for those who are very
creatively strong, who have a filter, having such a superfluity of
launching pads and diving boards works out well.

But most artists aren’t strong enough to withstand such an influx.

What is so interesting about Davidson’s piece on new classical is that
it shows how the possibilities and problems of post-broadband
music-making are manifesting all across the musical spectrum. I suspect
similar forces are at work – sometimes vitalizing, mostly vitiating –
in metal, but I wouldn’t know. It is definitely happening with dance
music especially with the area I’ve kept an ear trained on, i.e. the
post-dubstep zone.

Here the exact same hyperstatic symptoms that Davidson diagnoses in
modern composition can be seen leading to a similar predicament: a
diverting but directionless impasse. A seeming heterogeneity that
conceals a fundamental homogeneity (traceable back, ultimately, to the
nature of digital sound and its structuration protocols.) Paradoxically,
it is the more insular, technologically-retarded scenes (footwork in
Chicago now, hardcore rave in the early 90s) that produce a better
outcome: a seeming homogeneity that masks genuine hetereogenity and
forward-tilted strangeness.

The other thing worth saying about these nu-fusion or “superhybrid”
styles/scenes is that their very rhetoric and philosophical repertoire
has a pronounced “retro” air. These ideas and ideals have been around
for what feels like forever! “New New School” nods to 1970s downtown New
York in the Seventies , the post-Fluxus fluxed-upness and post-Cage
uncagedness of minimalism, performance artists, and such edge-of-punk /
outskirts of No Wave figures as Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Arthur
Russell.

Justin Davidson’s piece seems to have garnered a slew of annoyed and
outright hostile responses from the modern composition community. One
of the more measured responses, “The New Challenges of New Thinking”,
appeared in Zeitschichten.

Peter Gilbert précis-ed the anti-Davidson stance: “He is called out
as being an old school modernist, entrenched in a decrepit idea—that
making something new requires rejecting the formerly new”, with
commentators dismissing Davidson’s verdict of “a neither-here-nor-there
absence of motivational direction” as mired in subjectivity. (Cue a
twinge of déjà vu/writerly solidarity in me!).

Gilbert situates the conflict–and the annoyance–in terms of a
generational shift. “The thirty-somethings of today… are the second
generation of the everything’s-okay, no-style-can-hold-us ethos. For us
this thinking is more normal than revolutionary, though we don’t take it
for granted—I think we still own our omnivorous tastes with (probably
unnecessary) pride…. the core ideal of nonsectarianism has almost
complete ascendency now.”

Gilbert astutely notes that the musical radicals of the past who
broke down aesthetic barriers created a world where there are in fact no
barriers: “the power of their vision led to the open-minded future they
wanted and subsequently (unintentionally) denied their students the
opportunity to similarly respond”… As a result, the last ardent rigor…
has dissolved into transition”.

But (as Retromania argues) the trouble with this state of endless
“transition” is that it looks a lot like the way fashion operates. Or
indeed how high finance operates. Where no value is immune from being
abruptly and utterly devalued.

What this means is that the principles and practices of “flux and
mutability” have long ago shed their former subversive and utopian
charge. Worse than that: they have become inverted, to the point where
if anything they suggest the static and dystopian. Because in some
fundamental and profoundly perturbing way, “flux” and “mutability” are
actually isomorphic with the economy, characterized as it is by
precariousness and the imposition of “flexible” work patterns.

This idea seems to lurk underneath Gilbert’s concluding remarks,
where he writes about how “there is something different about this world
where everything goes. We, the thirty-somethings, seem to largely be
ardent believers of the new order and we readily shoot down dissent,
but, as with anything relatively new, there are aspects and consequences
of the changes in culture that we can’t yet fully anticipate or
understand.”